Monkey-Town

By Carrie Chang

Monkey-Town is a fantasy thriller that describes the joyride experience of Jenna Wu in SF Chinatown, her ups and downs, and her ultimate enlightenment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 29, 2015
• ISBN: 9781503586819

Carrie Chang

Carrie Chang was born in 1970, in Syracuse, New York. She attended Stanford University, UC-Berkeley and New York University, obtaining her B.A., and M.J. and M.F.A. in English and journalism and creative writing, respectively. She worked as an Asian American journalist in the arts/political field for almost a decade, creating her own magazine, “Monolid,” and lives as a writer/poet in the Bay Area. Her favorite pastimes include swimming and painting.

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Copyright © 2015 by Carrie Chang.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 09/11/2015

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CONTENTS

PART I THE SHAMAN’S PROPHECY

PART II LUCK MING

PART III THE FLOATING HEM

PART IV FLORA’S WORLD

PART V THE CHANT

This book is

dedicated to the memory of my grandfather, Chang-Chih-Ho, who taught me the meaning of love and life.

PART I

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THE SHAMAN’S PROPHECY

F rom its imperial, good-for-nothing bamboo seats to its wizardly people with their crabby, upturned noses to its parakeet rice, which makes you go half stir-crazy, Monkey-town, with its unpredictable yawps and mawkish yips, allows the native brown eye to roll away on a Thursday evening when the ginseng-colored people are ambling down on Geary Street under the fractured moon as the sounds of spice buckets and dim sum huts makes the yellow heart go bitter weak.

In a spigot of purple mist, the monkey men play their fabulous instruments dreamily with a tsing and a zap, while the sere buff clouds overhead impart a rose-colored rain. After all, all in the city is zazen and afterlife, with a smidgen of contempt for famed onlookers. There was the final deluge of cosmic fingerprints on the overgrown cactus in the backyard of Yeo’s and virtuoso singing coming from the frappé windows of the castlelike apartments, which were covered with the thick of frothy pastel paint. Come, Master Shaman, come! calls out the deciduous, one-eared monk from the nearby temple, banging his supercilious brassy gong. The dolorous slight jaybirds quietly slurp their pikay seeds in sweet slumber.

In the lamplight, the broken rainbow of sampan lusts tenets over the whole city, while its denizens sleep quietly, dreaming of medicine of the heart, turning fitfully in a brocade of weighty matters, their dark nostrils piqued by the aroma of incense and reverie. There was, of course, the variety of what the famous sandman would bring in tomorrow, of whose dream would be fulfilled with a pash of light, of what rays would shine on the flashy aureole of the anointed children of the entire fabled town. The harpy dragon flies through the oval window, with thick unctuous breath on its lavender scales, warning the people of their outright heresy.

At the super-karmic zoo, weepy arms and weepy legs pour out of the creepy seesaw aquarium of time and move like kettle-fish, glistening genie gold. Wab ghosts rattle in the basement, and imaginary hot congee thickens with despotic suspense in an obstreperous dream world, laughing in the oceanic fog. What matters is the disingenuous smile of bewitched sailors, the rigmarole of sheepish denizens moving about in iridescent circles of yore.

Here, the impossible smell of kung pao chicken makes one lurch forward for one’s chopsticks, knitting stories in a shock-hot fantasy, as six-prong dice and ruby-colored fingers make one merry in the next room at Yeo’s, where the action is always heavy. Lured by the lozenges of light in the waxy lilac wallpaper and the smell of pure cognac, I order my variety of dishes, a moiety of blush on my round fabled cheeks.

It’s the pure sanctity of the place that keeps me coming back for more, for the lovely saffron rice and the jade-scented bok choy as we hear the pipa playing melodiously for the countless time inside. With its telltale lotus signs and its magical scent of ambergris, I drink up at Yeo’s diner and finger my chubby bubble teas, jeering the shimmering jellies of tapioca to worm up on my pink tongue. It’s a holiday binge, some cleft of the mind for the happy gourmand, some tilt to the kung fu heart to be sure.

Why the women are so sad, living spare-dream lives that are balefully parceled out for the angel cherubs of subway fantasies, chewing on shredded celery and chicory sticks in their extra time, and complaining about the devil-may-care weather. Why the men choose to wear bowler derbies made of cheap felt and smoke their to-do cigars with a bit of panache on the spur? Why the derby seaside weather leaves you feeling so downright depressed and full of conniptions and verve? Such deep gunshot feelings so as not to be put down in a consummate frenzy.

The orchid-lipstick women pack their succor wares on Boulder Street with depressed hues of mercy leaving a blotter of disgrace in midair; they’re always channeling waves like that, beta-breakers of surprise from onlookers with their succulent waves, their curvy smiles in the soft light. One small break, and it could be their choleric eyes opening with poise, charming the whole world with a mystical wonder. Their caustic glow is like little Buddha’s touch, that glitter beyond reproach, some ra-ta-ta-ta of the skeleton finger beyond the open-and-shut closet.

The sass of the dragon ladies in the spiritual cloud of forgotten stitch will enchant tourists, as do the jade pieces of the faux Ming vases beguile double-spawn; with reddish hyacinth hues, those contours of mishmash art of past dynasties find themselves on display near the toy store on Clay Street as signs of another world, the forgotten beat era.

With chewed-up betel nut in the silvery cracks of the sidewalks and some sassafras on the tongues of the shih tzus, the infernal beat goes on as the leathery peanuts glimmer in the sunshine with circuslike vanity. Why try to understand it, the spidery splotch of calligraphy on the metro station, which passes as outright Chinese? Why try to break those delimiters of geography, stretching past susurrus clouds of nether-zero? Bother to see those in situ spacey elements of wind and moon, which cross over into the city and ruin the whole thing?

I’d like to think of Mr. Lim’s toy store as the hazy place where the toy clock spins out its delicious numbers of bingo and the smiles of miniature nutcrackers doing their usual spondee digits with automatic luster, the famous laundry store where the frosted elements turn and toss in the driers until they become cherry-blind, the caterpillar dust on the bright pillowcases turning into lighter bronze. All these are symptomatic of the kind of distractions you’ll find in the city—the beat-up velveteen dresses and upturned noses, the rice cookers with offbeat sausages in them, and the blessings of pious plenty.

It’s well known that the women of Monkey-town wear shoulder-strap chongsams, purple silk in the moonlight with bangs and play their one-up cards in smoky, unkempt rooms, their eye shadow crooked and their lips warbling with accents like fish. Their dull eyes ooze with compunction about the final blessed hour, and as the chefs do their hocus-pocus with steaming squid fried rice, they use their push-up bras like accordions, with winning guts, scouting out the itsy-bitsy mosquitoes in their mai tai drinks. Their spider drinks in tow. How seething are their looks, and with what juicy venom do they paint their toes—a wowsy ochre or a dainty red—as if done in bread box with holes, as in a cartoonish dab.

How awesome are the Buddha’s callings! cries out the one-eared monk, banging his brass gong as if to wake the neighborhood up. His words rake the purling wind and send scattered leaves purling over the trick bricks as if to cover them with meretricious gold, the faux cobblestones.

Like spiritual animé, the fish-kettle pouf blows its smoke out the chestnut door, and the green-mint umbrellas in the water spin vertiginously. The snaky light of spoons meanders along the dragonlike bodies of the women who play their cards with raucous laughter. Outside, on Waverly Street, the yew trees glisten with bronze sap. The supernatural fabric of fowl and finch felt upon the earth, with gimlet mosquitoes calling into question the foul weather. The weird mimelike motions of the women are like ticktock wind-up toys, the legerdemain of the Far East, not to mention this idle talk of incestuous strangers.

I guess you call it into question, the magic of Monkey-town, says the shaman, pouting, his arms akimbo, his sorry shadow incomplete, standing in the doorway at Waverly Street, gnats all about his clean, moth-eaten face. The magic of the monkey men is without question!

The stud marks of the callow witches and warlords of the place make me wince entirely over their precious congee, over their haloed remarks, reminding one of lost footnotes from the desiccated crypt. Like flirtatious hyenas, they suspend life with a fried bit of affectations and hubris. It hurts them because they’re crying so damned hard. Their scintillating hair stands up on end like the flyaway punctuation of the beats.

With both chopsticks knitting legends of blasé color, it’s then that they feast on ideas of the past and the future, dripping beads of red soy on their toes. How is it, they say, that the moon shines, as an operative dime in the slot machine, push-coin heavy? In their plumlike antiquity, they walk about on these fairy-tale clogs and muck-it up, their slim damper eyes turning to high heaven.

I could reveal to you my inner feelings of Monkey-town in a solitary thud, only to converse with you for a few moments about the simple rose-colored tablecloths on fire, about the stringy, disenchanted women, about Mr. Fong’s wild rants into town and their black arts phenomenon. All was a wild rainbow fix, this rambunctious ride into nowhere. Their cheap, dapper hats they tipped to the Buddha but were surprised when they flew off in the sequined wind, the grasshopper’s continuous tsin gin the electric filthy air.

***

Of course, I remember Mr. Fong and his philosophical rants, his ragtime charm and his chocolate-colored fedora, his ginseng nose turning wild colors in the wind, his heavy tread and the chortling of his Cantonese, the way the shopkeepers would stare at him as if he were a heavy artifact in bas-relief shining in the faded, dried-out sun, and his eager skin like a scaly antidote to quarrelsome remarks about old men’s beauty. Lang zhai! That hot young man I used to be!

Them ginger-colored folk, that’s what they were, the tiny people of Monkey-town brushing their teeth fastidiously on a holiday or staring at you squeamishly from their four-eye lenses in the orange buff. What made them so special was their utter hospitality, their utter saintliness, and their foolish egalitarian pride. I’d like to add that the people of Monkey-town were enraged by their state of native allowance and spoke lightly of their plight, scooping many dollops of rice into their plates with upturned noses.

"Well, it’ll be that, the moo goo gai pan tonight or the winter melon soup!" Mrs. Wong would say tenderly to herself, buttering up her dayroom curls and moving her dishpan outside her window at precisely four in the afternoon. Such utter desperation in her spindle eyes